21 Oct You are working hard.

You are working hard. You are working hard at being the right kind of you, being on time, being creative, being accountable, being fit, being pretty, being natural, being good enough, being great enough for some invisible and highly visible audience. You curate yourself for public consumption and that seems to be what “everyone” expects and is hungry for, the bright, polished, high shine you.

You are busy. You are busy moving fast from task to task. You are busy filling in any gaps in your schedule and busy working hard. Moving forward. Being busy. Never stopping. You’ve got shit to do.

You are tired. You feel like you are in a race and the finish line keeps being moved further away and your shoes are getting pretty thin in the soles. You don’t feel like it’s ok to stop because you might lose your place and never catch up. You are tired, feeling un-rooted, like your feet are just skimming the surface as you dance the hustle. Bone tired.

It’s not inaction vs. action, not stop vs. start. I am not suggesting an early retirement from the pursuit of your dreams, from the application of your amazing will being applied on behalf of the vision that is gestating inside of you. I am calling you deeper toward a resonant and refillable strength that can fuel your work in the world. An exhausted body and a harried mind cannot ultimately sustain a big vision without there being a profound sacrifice to your body and soul.

There is a way to move in the world to express your big mission that doesn’t require a complete abandonment of your wholeness. Imagine a small child. A little person who has been at a birthday party all day and before that to the park and after the party, the train or the car ride home. Would you then suggest that this tiny human do some alphabet work and then work hard on learning how to tie her shoes? A mega tantrum or a collapse into a weeping puddle on the floor would be a reasonable and expected response. Somewhere deep inside of you there is a tiny, little girl having a melt down, but no one is listening to her!

As you are no longer tiny and no one is going to make sure that you have a snack and then nap time every day, other than you, perhaps it is time to draw your resources from somewhere other than fumes. I am a big proponent of a daily practice (or multiple times a day!) of dropping down below your head and back into your whole body and then dropping further down and into the energy of Mama Earth. Yep, she’s right there. Under your feet, your car wheels, your building, the cement sidewalk, in fact…she is all of those things!

Yes, I know that you know that she’s the planet that you live on. But did you know that by slowing your breath way, way down, the in of it and the out of it, you can very quickly quiet the stress voice. Did you know that if you place one palm against your womb space, just below your belly button and then invite a sigh or a sound on the exhale, loud enough for you to hear it, that you can start the flow of the hormone Oxytocin in your tired body? Did you know that spending 3 minutes doing all of this can cause feelings of goodness to warm you up from the inside and that repeating this a few times a day will begin fueling your work and your busyness from a sourced place rather than a depleted one? Don’t take my word for it. Try it. Go on, what do you have to lose, other than those frown lines across your forehead as you hustle.